Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.
At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.
Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.
A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.
I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil
I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.
Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.
From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.
My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)
I've been much happier since I started weighing everything.
(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)
In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.
There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.
(Also linked above)
The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:
Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.
On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.
Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
Separate yolk and white (as though you were going to beat the whites). Weigh both, reduce both by 30%. Recombine.
Better is to just base the entire recipe off the weight of the egg.
Start with the egg(s), scale everything else to match. 50g egg? Cool you get even increments of 50g, 100g, etc. 48g egg? Weigh out 96g instead of 100g of the other ingredient.
Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?
Sales will, in fact, continue to go up as people now have to buy twice the item count to get the same calories.
The Market is not a benevolent magical entity. It is a machine that only has a single variable: profit.
You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.
Maybe people will start doing that?
Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.
Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...
Costs $50 to do a batch tho.
Oh wait you probably have all of them already.
Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?
Because you value convenience?
Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.
Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.
A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.
He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.
The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!
Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.
* 270g flour: 65¢
* 6g baking powder: 10¢
* 3g baking soda: 1¢
* 4.5g salt: 1¢
* 64g cocoa: $1.15
* 354g sugar: 90¢
* 113g butter: $1.42
We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.
Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.
So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.
[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...
Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon
I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking
She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.
Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.
I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.
When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.
My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
- 2 boxes cake mix
- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)
- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)
YMMV
They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!
The King Arthur powders are great:
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m...
https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow...
And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter:
The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.
My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.
With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.
Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?
The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.
Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.
AfterHIA•2h ago